Precious Metals

Gold earns nothing, promises nothing, and does nothing — and in 2025 it set 53 record highs. Understanding why means looking past the headlines to three forces: the real return on cash, the value of the dollar, and the price of fear. Here’s how each one actually works, and why the old rulebook has started to bend.

Every other form of money that existed 5,000 years ago is gone. Gold is still here — still traded around the clock, still stacked in central bank vaults, still the asset people reach for when trust in everything else wavers. This is the story of why precious metals endure, and how their markets actually work.

Three ancient civilizations built the conceptual scaffolding of modern money. How silver and gold became the first widely trusted way to store value and settle exchange.